Concord v0.56.0
Concord went public since the last release, and most of this is the work of
making it worth looking at: text that lays out correctly whatever script you
write in, a profile you can actually decorate, and a history you can carry.
Right-to-left text
Mixed Arabic, Hebrew, Persian or Urdu was being displayed reordered. Every
text surface was implicitly left-to-right, so the bidirectional algorithm
resolved a whole mixed paragraph against that, and the punctuation at the
boundary — the full stop ending a sentence, a comma between clauses — attached
to the wrong end. The text was stored correctly and drawn wrong, which reads as
though the sender typed it that way.
Composers and message bodies now take their direction line by line, so one
message can hold an English line and an Arabic line and lay both out correctly,
and the draft box is a real preview of the result. Code is held left-to-right,
because an Arabic comment would otherwise flip an entire snippet. Names carried
into fixed furniture are isolated so they cannot drag surrounding punctuation.
Arabic is also set in a typeface chosen for it. Every bundled family ships
Latin subsets only, so Arabic previously fell back to whatever the operating
system had — two unrelated typefaces in one sentence. Three companions are now
bundled, each scoped so that anyone who never types Arabic never downloads one.
Wear something
Sixty-one drawn decorations and rings, in one picker and one slot, painted
in any of twelve colourways or in your own colour. They are drawn rather
than pictured, so they take a colour and stay sharp at any size.
The rendering was rebuilt underneath. Decorations used to be flat fills with
four possible colours, which is why so many of them came out the same shade of
one thing. They now have real light — one direction for the whole library, a
shadow cast onto the face beneath, and a colour expanded into five shades in a
perceptual colour space, so picking red gives you red metal rather than a red
wash.
Your profile card
Twelve drawn animated scenes to play across it — a wraith crossing moonlit
woods, a lighthouse working a coastline, planets turning on their arms — and
the twenty-nine particle fields alongside them. Twelve frames to put around
the card. Forty-four theme packs behind all of it.
Your history
An encrypted backup of every guild and direct message that restores onto
another device, a full export in plain Markdown, and a guild can now agree
how long it keeps messages.
Also
A landing page and a guide to running your own rendezvous node. The profile
editor's live preview now shows the decoration you just picked. Dependencies
moved forward where they could: the DHT and pubsub bumps are in, and TURN is
held back deliberately — 4.1.4 moves to a transport version the rest of the
stack cannot compile against.